There was poison in the room and it was lethal. Quietly leaking out of the empty walls and closet. Leaking out of the bed. It all belonged to her.
Poison was what she owned.
It filled the empty room.
“Old onions,” she said. “The shit of the dying smells like old rotten onions. There is shit in the halls even as we speak. Did you know that? There is shit in the sink. They have to diaper them here but it doesn’t help. They empty it into the sinks, into the toilets. They walk in it through the halls. No, my little baby boy did not call me tonight. The call I received was from an old admirer. Who is dead now. I have many who are dead.”
Poison. Madness.
Wayne had lived with this.
Covitski touched his sleeve.
He was right. They weren’t going to gain anything more here tonight than what they’d already gotten. Which was plenty. It didn’t excuse Lock but it went a distance toward explaining him.
“If he were in trouble, where would he go?” he asked.
The question was pro forma at this point but you never knew.
“I have no idea,” she said.
“And when was the last time you saw him?”
The woman smiled. The bed began to shake.
He realized she was laughing.
It was soundless, eerie.
She stopped. Her face went dreamy.
“When I had him in my mouth,” she said.
And then she was lost, remembering.
“Three years ago. July or maybe August. It was a very warm day. I made him come. I always do. I had him in my mouth and I swallowed. I sucked him dry.”
She laughed. The laugh of an evil, sly young girl.
And god help him, he believed her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
He was a bee. The world was his flower.
He was pollinating the world, carrying the seeds of life with him in the broad wide circle of his flight, dropping the seeds into the ground where they would roil and decay and finally burst open, their flowering the turbulence of maggots, the birth of flies, the endless chain of life.
Route 89 South to 2 North to 93 South at Saint Johnsbury, down through the White Mountains, in New Hampshire again, down through the national forest, dark empty highway, barely a car on the road, trees looming. He could hear Carole and Lee bumping around in back when the roads got rougher. They could die in there or not. Like everybody else, all they wanted was to hurt him. It wasn’t going to happen. His book was filling up with them. He could feel it press against his chest, weighty, massive.
Down through Compton and Blair and Livermore Falls to 3A and Plymouth, cruising south through the latenight, dimly lit college town, yet another fucking college town, passing the Trolley Car Restaurant twice and passing yet again, nobody on the streets but a stumbling drunk old man. Not enough. Not good enough.
Driving.
North on Route 3—buzzing—a long steep road sliding gently down into an open valley and up again, the occasional house, lights on in the window, forest on all sides and then a left at Avery’s General Store, dark, deserted at this hour and driving the winding mountain road to Ellsworth, past the Chapel of Saint John of the Mountains, bone white in the moonlight, perched old and tiny like a skeleton on the side of a hill, Rev. Roger Pecke Cleveland, Minister. Onto a narrow dirt road, climbing.
This was going nowhere.
Turning, kicking up dust—he could taste it in his mouth, feel it in his teeth.
How you doing back there? He could feel them bumping around pretty good now.
Back down the road past a small country graveyard, a beaver pond, over a bridge, back to 3A, back toward Plymouth and the state college.
He was about a mile and a half from town when he saw them in the valley by the side of the road.
And oh, he was young. Oh, she was pretty.
He pulled over.
It was farmland all around here. A wide-open field down below. A barn and a silo. Deserted.
He reached into the backseat. Into the open suitcase.
This made up for so much.
The boredom. The endless days of being and yet…not being. The unfairness of all the people around him. The traps first his father, and then later his mother, had set for him.
This was what he was meant to do. To be.
The night wrapped him in rich destiny and its cloak was soft and warm.
“Need a hand?” he said.
The girl was standing over the boy with one small thin blue-veined naked hand on her hip and the other resting on the roof of the car. She looked up and smiled as he got out and slammed the door. The girl was wearing cut-off jeans and a white tailored shirt many sizes too big for her, rolled up at the sleeves. The girl was trusting.
The boy glanced over his shoulder. He was working on the lugs with the lug wrench. The boy smiled too. “Thanks, but we’re fine,” he said. The boy had done this before. He was competent. We’re fine. “Not really,” said Wayne, and produced the gun.
Lynn Naylor had considered her luck debatable.
At the age of ten she was riding her cousin’s bike down a neighbor’s driveway. The driveway was newly paved—it looked smooth and inviting.
The bike was much too small for her. In fact they’d only recently taken off its training wheels. And it didn’t have hand brakes. Only foot brakes. And her legs were so long it was hard for her to get the proper leverage.
So that when the driveway wound around the back of the house and plunged suddenly down a long steep hill she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t get the leverage. She dragged her bare feet along the fresh macadam until her toes were bloody but it didn’t help.
At the bottom of the hill was a dome-shaped granite boulder over ten feet high at its jagged peak, twenty-two feet long, and she tried to steer toward the narrow space—just a path, really—between the boulder and the thick grove of pines surrounding it.
By the time she reached bottom, the bike was going much too fast for her to manage.
She clipped the edge of the rock at over thirty miles an hour, that was what the police had told her. The borrowed bike was a twisted ruin. At the moment of impact she had thrown her arm straight out in front of her. And that had saved her life. Her forearm snapped—she could still remember the sound of it snapping—but it also vaulted her over on top of the rock instead of headfirst into it.
She came away with eighteen stitches in her back, ten scarred toes, a mild concussion and a broken arm.
On the one hand she supposed that was pretty lucky.
On the other hand you had to factor in the driveway itself and its particular allure for her on that day. You had to factor in the blind sudden plunge. The too-small bicycle. And the rock.
Not so lucky.
A year ago she and Ben had totaled his Ford. They were driving a rain-slick road on a hot summer day and another car—a Pontiac—was passing, its rear tires sliding over no more than a foot or so, just enough so that the rear of the Pontiac kissed their left front bumper and sent them flying off the road over an embankment. The next thing she remembered she was sitting inside the roof of the car and Ben was already coming around the other side, opening the door and pulling her out.
They emerged without a scratch.
But in this as in the other incident her luck had to be considered debatable. You had the fact that she had lived through it at all balanced by the fact that it had happened in the first place, and for her the two seemed to cancel each other out. The coin had flipped—and amazingly, had twice now landed on its edge. It proved nothing to her except that against the wildest odds, she was still alive.
Ben Stillman knew he was fortunate. No question.
His proof was simple.
He had college, he had work, he had a future, and he had Lynn. Not necessarily in that order.
College had been hard to come by because it was hard to afford. His father was a Paterson, New Jersey, stonemason, union all the way, and when the union said sorry
, you don’t work his father didn’t work. Which was often. But Ben had held down his own jobs since he was fifteen. He’d saved and he’d studied. His mom worked as an office clerk and that had helped some too. But mostly he was making it on his own. He made sure his grades were fine in high school and now here he was with a working scholarship to Plymouth State, well on his way to a master’s in business at an even better school two years down the line.
He was not going to be some union man. He was not going to work with his hands when he did work and drink and sit in front of the tube all day when he didn’t. He would not grow a gut. He would have money.
Then there was Lynn.
Back in Paterson a girl like Lynn would never have looked at him. He wasn’t even sure they had girls like Lynn in Paterson. She was subtle, funny, educated—private schools, mostly. With one year in public school “for seasoning.” She was lovely as any woman he’d ever met and she was probably going to be wealthy one day in her own right. Her family had old Boston money. She’d been lazy gradewise through high school but she wasn’t anymore, not since meeting him, she was going after her own master’s and they were looking at the same schools together—Stanford, Wharton, Harvard—the top of the line all the way.
In bed she was responsive fire. Heart and brains. Controlled and measured unpredictability.
He felt that there was nothing he wanted that he either did not already have or could not someday reach.
There would be children. Vacations. Leisure.
Between them they could do anything.
They could even change a tire.
So he didn’t need this guy in the slightest but thought it was nice of him to offer. It was the sort of thing he liked about New Hampshire. People were really neighborly. It was too bad a person couldn’t generate much money living here. For that you needed cities. New York or L.A. or Washington.
But you could certainly consider retiring here someday. Homes could be had for a song and taxes were among the lowest in the nation.
It almost amazed him. That here he was as young as he was looking that far down the road.
So that when this fellow crossed the road he didn’t give him a thought, just kept working on the lugs—and he never saw the gun or the big claw hammer, one in each hand, until the hammer came down on him once and then a second time, and he could hear Lynn screaming into the silent warm void of the night that seemed to trickle down over his forehead, his cheeks, and into his eyes.
Blinding all that vision.
He used his foot to shove the boy’s body under the car.
The road’s grading made it easy. The boy rolled under.
“You know how to use a jack?” he said.
The girl nodded, looking not at him but at the gun.
He liked the way she cried. No sobbing. No sound at all. Just a steady wash of tears.
“Jack it down. Then throw everything into the trunk. Got that?”
The girl went to work.
Two cars parked a few feet away from one another on opposite sides of the road, both safely off to the shoulder. Nobody would give them a thought. With the car jacked down you wouldn’t see the boy.
Which meant he’d have some time here.
She stared up into moonlight.
The trees were black and gray and maggot white. The man in front of her was black. A silhouette. She could smell the damp earth beneath her, smell the chafed bark of the tree, the sharp hot metallic smell of twisted, abraded wire.
She was lying on her back. Old leaves soft beneath her. A pillow of moss and lichen lumpy beneath her head.
He had wound the length of bailing wire around the slim trunk of the birch tree and then around her wrists, twisting the wire off tight over each wrist with a pair of pliers.
She could taste the thick salt of snot and tears.
She could not stop trembling. It was electric. A low steady hum.
“I think I’ll let you live,” he said.
He knelt beside her and lifted off her sandals one by one and set them carefully down behind him. The gun never left his hand. Nor the pliers in the other.
“I’m going to fuck you, though,” he said. “You understand that?”
She couldn’t see his eyes. But his voice was almost mild. She nodded.
“Lift up.”
She raised her hips. The man unzipped her cutoffs and pulled them off her. Folded them once and placed them beside her sandals.
“Lift again.”
Then suddenly the man was a blur of tears.
But she did as she was told.
The leaves, the ground were cold and damp.
He folded the panties and placed them next to the cutoffs. Sandals and clothes in an even line directly behind him.
He unbuttoned her shirt starting with the top button and moving slowly down—and only when he was finished did he part it, revealing her.
“Beautiful,” he whispered.
He leaned closer, black, blotting out the moon and sky. The gun moved to her lips, its barrel cold, parting them.
“Please” she tried to say. It came out “preesss.” The barrel stayed there, pressed against her teeth. She felt the chill of metal, the pliers, circle over the flesh of her breast and then spiral slowly inward, teasing her toward mute horror. She felt them open and embrace the blossoming ridge of flesh. Closing. Gently squeezing. Cold, jagged. Terrible.
Then grasping, lifting.
Her body arched.
“I could use these on you,” said the man.
It was as though he were reciting something he’d learned. As though he’d got it somewhere and the words weren’t even his.
He laughed. The jaws released her. “But I won’t,” he said.
She fell back against the leaves.
He didn’t know. He didn’t understand.
He already had.
And then later she was wet with him, wet between her legs, breasts slick with his sweat. Smelling of him. Droplets from his forehead sliding down across her cheeks.
He dropped away from her next to the line of clothing and stood and buckled his pants.
She hurt.
He had used his fingernails, his teeth. She hurt everywhere.
“You got to change it,” he said. “You got to change it every time.” His breath was coming in gasps. He was not strong. She had learned that. Not without the gun. His arms and legs were thin and bony. He did not have too much stamina.
She thought of Ben and pushed the thought away.
Pushed it all away.
He was tucking in his shirt, looking down at her.
“Your MO, I mean. You know what that means? That means modus operandi. The way you do things. If you don’t change it then they catch you.”
She realized that he was talking about her death.
“Which is why I used the hammer. Smart, you see? First they’re looking for a .38 and then a .357 and now a hammer. Three different people, right?”
No, she thought. Four.
When he leaned over again she noticed that he was still short of breath. Another, shorter length of wire was in his hand. He wound it once around her neck and grasped hold of the ends.
She didn’t struggle. There was only one possible way to live through this. There had never been another.
The coin had to come to rest on its spinning edge, neither heads nor tails.
“You’d just go after me,” he said. “You’d call the cops. I know you hate me. I know you hated this.”
He entered her again through his open fly.
She stiffened as the wire tightened around her neck, felt his left hand shudder with the effort of pulling it taut, felt the blood slide down her neck and pool in the hollow of her shoulder blades.
The night went bright with flashes of yellow fire and then went dark. Her breathing stopped. Her head fell back against the moss, her body against the damp cool leaves.
Somewhere far beyond her, a man stood up and turned toward the road.
CHA
PTER TWENTY-FOUR
They were driving again and the nausea had returned, compounded of the smell of gas and auto exhaust and blind, dark, vertiginous motion. And fear. She was getting used to feeling sick. Nausea like a condition, like being pregnant, like a morning sickness.
Like a hangover.
Nausea. Weakness.
Lee’s arms around her weren’t enough—insufficient to take her beyond herself, out of herself, or to bring her closer to him. And she wondered if they had ever been truly close, this man she had slept with and killed with and had every intention of marrying—if they lived to marry.
It seemed they had. And then it didn’t.
But they must have. Otherwise it was all…everything was…
…meaningless.
And there was the fear again.
Not of Wayne this time, but of sheer futility. That all this had led nowhere. Or could have led nowhere else. Her life from childhood to this moment seemed to hang over her like some sort of curse. She realized that emptiness, that lack, could be terrifying. As much as physical threat.
She wondered if this was what it felt like to be homeless, on the streets and cut adrift in the world, friendless, hopeless, alone. If this was what hostages felt like. A political prisoner held far away from home and loved ones. She felt homeless now, locked in a prison she had been making for herself her whole life long. Starting long ago, when she and her sister where just little girls.
And Lee’s arms didn’t help.
How could she have ever expected them to? A man’s arms. Only that.
She was a fool.
She remembered when they’d met at Howard’s club. Memory like a vision. Had something really passed between them? Between both of them? Or had she simply sent a message and he received it? Help. I’m vulnerable. I hate this. Take me out of here and I’m the most available woman you’ll ever want to meet.
He was not a member of the club, of course. He was there courtesy of Howard, his new boss. Presumably the idea was for him to lose to Howard at eighteen holes of golf. Instead, Lee whipped him soundly. Maybe he was already sick of Howard. It was possible. It didn’t take a lot of people very long. Three weeks later they had met again in the parking lot of the Food Emporium and he asked if she’d had lunch yet. He was dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans—it was a Thursday, his day off. He looked nothing like Howard nor anybody who would even work for Howard, and by two in the afternoon they were in bed in his condo and by four she had told him everything.